On his way home from Strassburg, he relates, the sight of some specimens of ancient art in Mannheim "shook his faith in northern architecture," and the impression he thus received was to become a permanent conviction.

It was in the art of classical antiquity that he was to find the expression of his maturest ideal; when in later years his attention was temporarily turned to Gothic architecture, it was with little of his youthful enthusiasm that he admitted its claim to our regard.
"I cannot go on long without a passion," Goethe wrote in his twenty-third year, and we have no difficulty in believing him.

In Strassburg he lived through a passion which was to be the occasion of his giving the first clear proof to the world that he was to be among its original poets.

On the 14th of October, 1770, more than five months after his arrival in Strassburg, he wrote these words to a correspondent: "I have never so vividly experienced what it is to be content with one's heart disengaged as now here in Strassburg."[85] In the same letter in which these words occur he casually mentions that he has just spent a few days in the country with some pleasant people.
These pleasant people were a pastor Brion and his family living at Sesenheim, an Alsace village some twenty miles from Strassburg.

These few days spent with the Brion family were to be the beginning of a history which, as Goethe relates it in his Autobiography, has the character of an idyll, but, when stripped of the poetic haze which he has thrown around it, is not far from tragedy.